Kaminario

Kaminario, which used to be in the business of solid state storage via DRAM, now is emphasizing hybrid DRAM/flash storage appliances instead. The reason is evidently price. Per terabyte of primary storage (before mirroring onto disk and so on):

Kaminario positions DRAM as where you focus your most write-intensive/ bottlenecking loads, such as logging or temp space, with the primary benefit being performance and a secondary benefit being slowing the wear on your flash.

… start-ups that are building technologies to enable MySQL and other SQL databases to get over some of the problems they have in scaling past a certain size. … I’d like to get a sense as to whether or not the problems are as severe and wide spread as these companies are telling me? If so, why wouldn’t a customer just move to a new database?

While that sounds as if he was asking about scale-out relational DBMS in general, MySQL or otherwise, short-request or analytic, it turned out that he was asking just about short-request scale-out MySQL. My thoughts and comments on that narrower subject include(d) but are not limited to: Read more

Throw out your disks and replace them with, not Flash, but actual DRAM.

Your IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) are so high* that you get the performance you need without any further system changes.

The whole thing is very fast to set up.

In other words, Kaminario pitches a value proposition something like (my words, not theirs) “A shortcut around your performance bottlenecks.”

*1 million or so on the smallest Kaminario K2 appliance.

Kaminario asserts that both analytics and OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) are represented in its user base. Even so, the use cases Kaminario mentioned seemed to be concentrated on the analytic side. I suspect there are two main reasons:

As Kaminario points out, OLTP apps commonly are designed to perform in the face of regrettable I/O wait.

*Somebody can think up a new analytic query overnight that takes 10 times the processing of anything they’ve ever run before. Or they can get the urge to run the same queries 10 times as often as before. Both those kinds of thing happen less often in the OLTP world.

Accordingly, Kaminario likes to sell against the alternative of getting a better analytic DBMS, stressing that you can get a Kaminario K2 appliance into production a lot faster than you can move your processing to even the simplest data warehouse appliance. Kaminario is probably technically correct in saying that; even so, I suspect it would often make more sense to view Kaminario K2 appliances as a transition technology, by which I mean:

You have an annoying performance problem.

Kaminario K2 could solve it very quickly.

That buys you time for a more substantive fix.*

If you want, you can redeploy your Kaminario K2 storage to solve your next-worst performance bottleneck.

On that basis, I could see Kaminario-like devices eventually getting to the point that every sufficiently large enterprise should have some of them, whether or not that enterprise has an application it believes should run permanently against DRAM block storage. Read more